Welcome

In September 2010 a team of three researchers (two cultural geographers and a photographer) set out to find and visit workplaces in the South West where people fix broken things.

Notebooks and cameras were the project tools, and these tools produced the archive of texts and images you’ll find on this website, the culmination of eighteen months of fieldwork. The day-to-day development of the project is archived on our blog here.

The project was inspired by an attraction to the aesthetics of these workplaces, but also by an interest in what the practices of fixing, mending, repair and renewal could reveal about the way people value things, and each other. In the words of Elizabeth Spelman:

‘...though we do not repair everything we value, we would not repair things unless they were in some sense valuable to us, and how they matter to us shows us in the form of repair we undertake ’.

We invite you to explore these different ‘forms of repair’ that are featured on this site. Go to the Sites and Stories section and click the thumbnails to see the images.